July 10th, 2009:

Here’s a nice, high-school physics level lab demonstration of an aluminum air battery, made from aluminum foil, aquarium charcoal, salt water, and a paper towel. A few of these in series will run a simple solid-state radio. It would be fun to figure out how to expand the concept into something a little more durable, with thicker aluminum plates, in some kind of container that will confine the messy materials and yet admit oxygen to sustain the reaction.

When I first got into computing in the midlate 1970s I had a number of CPU green cards, but was always a little puzzled that none of them were…green. (The COSMAC green card was blue, and the 8080 green card was white.) In truth, I didn’t know at the time why everybody called them “green cards,” and if you still don’t know, here’s a site where you can see the real deal. (Thanks to Richard Haley for the link.)

Google Books has mounted most (if not quite all) of a fascinating book called Hi There, Boys and Girls! which is a history of local children’s TV programming in the US. The book is organized by TV markets around the country, and the Google Books version is intriguing for how much material is actually available for free. The Chicago material is available, and excellent, if not as detailed as Jack Mulqueen’s full-book treatment in The Golden Age of Chicago Children’s Television, which has a much more limited Google Books preview.